Thanks to Chris for editing these episodes while Josh was recovering from… whatever.

Also, that thing that Rutskarn does at the start of the episode where he narrates generic cop-man thoughts? I’m pretty sure there’s no upper limit to how much of that I could listen to.

The story in this game is so hilariously at odds with the gameplay that I’m actually angry at them for playing it this straight. Even if the player arrested every possible suspect and only shot when they really needed to, the scene would still end with an explosive chase scene. It’s just absurd to have Dawes show up at the very end of that chase and complain that the suspect’s face was bruised. We’re supposed to be worried about Kai, but there’s no way she could possibly be responsible for as much damage as the player.

So Officer Mendoza… I see here on your report that you – and stop me if I’m reading this wrong – gunned down 12 men and did tens of thousands of dollars of damage to a hotel lobby. Then you took an automatic weapon from the crime scene and used it to kill another half dozen men in a public place. After which you stole a civilian vehicle and initiated a chase which caused five explosions, the death of ten more people, and the destruction of untold city property, including a construction trailer. Also you allege that Officer Kai punched a suspect and hit him with a lightweight wastepaper basket? Based on your report, we’re giving her a two day paid suspension, and you’re sentenced to fifty years in the electric chair.

The story in the cutscenes is trying to take itself very seriously, but the story in the gameplay is beyond silly. The juxtaposition makes the self-serious story extra eye-rollingly dumb.

It is depressing, to the point of being infuriating, that there was no-one on this team who had a large enough view of the entire project to notice this issue, and also the power to do something about it. The auteur is dead, and COD killed him.

Right, and in this case, the gameplay story is too dumb to be taking itself seriously. The usual “ludonarrative dissonance” is when the gameplay is in conflict with itself. EG: Proving you’re not the assassin of the royal family by killing everyone involved in the real plot without collecting actual evidence that they were the involved (like only getting circumstantial and verbal admissions right before killing them).

But there’s so much driving in Police Quest… so much driving to find the triggers.

When do I get to commit genocidal, shames the actual war criminals, levels of murder on the villains? SHE RAN A STOP SIGN; WHERE IS MY RPG?! I’m a lose cannon, I don’t play by your rules – I refuse to shower!

Seriously though, it has some actual police work in that game… and a lot of showering.

Then I think that series turned into SWAT, or something like that? Which I think was basically “Rainbow 6 – police edition” with actual police procedure in it, not just “shoot all generic villains”. I could be wrong though.

SWAT 4 actually holds up really well, as both a single player experience and a co-op game.

It uses a score mechanic to enforce proper police procedure as well, but there it’s all about pushing the tension of weighing the safety of civilians and other hostages, against the due process of armed suspects.

You lose points for shooting a perp, unless they are actually pointing their guns at someone. You’ll often find yourself tempted to pull the trigger as soon as you see a weapon, especially MAC-10 SMGs. It’s not an easy call to make, especially in the heat of the moment. It can get even worse if there is an emotional component clouding your judgement, and this game will go out of it’s way to ask hard questions. Would you be more inclined to shoot early, if you had just found evidence, that the suspect had just murdered a bunch of babies?

It terms of games that teach their audience to respect the armed men and women of law enforcement, and also the awful power that they carry, I believe there is none better.

SWAT 4 kinda goes too far in the opposite direction though, with how much you end up putting your own life at risk to make sure the perps survive.

I don’t know how SWAT actually operates, but surely when a group of paramilitaries with automatic rifles takes hostages, by the time an entry team is sent it’s less a question of “spare as many criminals as you can” and more “try not to shoot too many hostages as collateral damage”.

It’s a videogame, who cares, but my favorite example of this is in the penultimate level, when a dozen of actual North Korean commandos take over a whole hospital, and the response is to send in a team of 5 SWAT guys with nonlethal weapons and no backup. As opposed to, I don’t know, the army?

I’m not entirely certain if the US military is allowed to perform such an operation on US soil even in a post-9/11 world. Maybe state National Guard? But you can bet your ass dozens of BATF and FBI-SWAT agents with sniper teams and APCs would swarm that place Waco-style.

Technically only the Army and the Air Force are prevented by a law from operating in such a way due to the Posse Comitatus Act. The Navy (and by extension the Marines) are currently only bound by regulation to follow that law. Since theirs is due to regulation it can be waived by certain authorities in the chain of command. This is probably due to the fact that no one spends nights worrying about destroyers coming up their streets. Oh and National Guard can do it but only on State authority…if the President tried to order them in it would fall under the act.

First, you would have to establish that you were dealing with a foreign entity, and second, you would have to be prepared for the foreign country to declare war on you for taking military action against its citizens.

And third, the military is primarily trained to eliminate threats to themselves, and are not really the people you want dealing with a hostage situation (I believe the military term for a hostage is ‘collateral damage’). SWAT is trained to expect civilians and is generally going to be a better fit.

Although like folks above said, no matter who’s involved it’s going to be a lot more than five guys.

Yes. Based on what I’ve seen in real life, they’d probably call in a bunch of SWAT units from different precincts. Theoretically, they could bring in the national guard, but mobilizing them would take too long, and since this is just a dozen or so guys with guns, this is still small enough for local police to handle. The national guard is mainly used domestically to respond to riots and natural disasters, and anything below that scale isn’t worth bringing them in for. Even during the Waco siege, all the nat guard did was provide reconnaissance and logistical support, and loan the FBI some of their vehicles. The FBI and ATF did the rest.

There’s more straightforward exceptions. State governors can ask the national military for assistance under a lot of circumstances, even so far as to a “please help us keep the peace” kind of request. What’s forbidden though is for the military to enforce state laws, nor can the federal government initiate the action save in matters that relate to national security, even without foreign powers being involved.

EG: the military can capture people and lock them up for being problems for the military operation, but can’t hold them for state trial.

I do love a bit of Police Quest. The early games had that mix of standard adventure gaming, mixed with proper police procedure! Quite impressive. Although it could be annoying when you lose the game because you forgot to do something in the proper way. The later games had less of this though, iirc.

No, guys, you’ve got it all wrong. “We got half the hoods in Miami shooting at us, and you’re working over Leo?” Mendoza’s not worried about the torture, that would be silly. He’s annoyed that his supposed ‘partner’ left him to fight all the mobs on his own, while she zipped ahead to the quest objective. Come on Dao! With teams like this, he might as well go back to picking up randoms and grinding the tutorial quest!

Also, she doesn’t think sleeves might be nice in the Everglades? At dusk? It’s marsh as far as the eye can see. Her arms are going to be end-to-end bug bites within the hour.

Aha, a wasted opportunity for the game to try out a couple of experimental marsh mechanics.

– Keep the boat still for a few seconds and clouds of bugs start homing in on you, with sound effects designed to infuriate especially headphone users.
– Keep driving at maximum speed for a while and you end up almost blind due to the thick buggage all over your face.
– Alligators constantly attack the boat. Just run them over or force them to the shore at high speeds and they explode!
– Alternatively, you can keep the gators in the sights of your harpoon until you get close enough to arrest them.

They say it’s been “a few weeks” since she got shot. It should probably be “a few months.”

And she’s still walking in to dangerous guaranteed-to-be-shooting-happening situations while not wearing a bulletproof vest. Just her low-cut black shirt that says “POLICE” on it. (Even if it’s bulletproof, half her heart is hanging out above it.)

Since it’s a first person perspective anyway, they could just make plain clothes model for the cutscenes and use less detailed generic multiplayer model (and I know they will be making several of those) with Mendoza’s face for occasional cutscenes where a vest makes sense (incidentally I don’t think we saw anything like that so far).

Considering all the money they must have spent to model all of these human looking humans… you would think it would be a drop in the ocean to have an extra non vest version of the player character, he has other clothes in the story too, seems like either pure laziness or a really dumb oversight.

THIS. Dragon Age: Inquisition made me wince more than once due to romance scenes that took place with one of the characters in full armor. (Cullen, I’m looking at you.) That would be less “aww, so romantic” and more “squish” “OW!”

It seems to trigger every time you touch the door, so if you try to open it again without killing the bad guy it triggers again. I guess if you killed one badguy and there was another still on the map they’d teleport him too

So why were you a regular cop in this game and not a swat guy?Swat guys are the ones that get the arsenal of weapons,and are the ones that can arrest multiple people without having to personally drag each one to their vehicle immediately,and most importantly the ones with heavy body armor that would protect them from a bunch of bullets.

Not to mention that for all the Robocop analogues, they should’ve just gone OCP on their concept. Make the city a crime-torn cesspool of bankruptcy to the point that they hire private paramilitaries to supplement their overworked police force (a concept that isn’t a fiction, and has scary implications).

If your organization is largely made up, so can your rules of engagement and so on. That allows for a streamlining of mechanics, and any absurdities can be chalked up to the suits back at Corporate HQ giving bad orders or not having the right people in charge of best practices, etc. It still puts you at odds with real police (which will happen later on in the game) and gives you access to whatever level of technological bang-bang and extra-judicial surveillance gear the parent company can afford.

The big problem is that SWAT are generally separate from the detectives (The Police who Investigate Crimes!) SWAT generally aren’t the ones out running sting operations and trailing suspects looking for clues. Which makes it a lot harder to build a “cop story” game around a SWAT member – SWAT doesn’t tend to stick with long-running investigations.

SWAT teams make for lousy “terrible cop narrative.” What they DO make for is really good BATTLEFIELD narratives, where “command has ordered us in to secure the objective and take down hostiles” is as good as you need for mission parameters. But they decided they wanted to tell a cop story narrative, and who are we to complain (apparently)?

When I got to the end of this episode and realized you’re going back to Assassin’s Creed 47 or whatever it’s called, I was so disappointed. This is so much more watchable, and has fewer characters who make you just want to take a shower.

Yeah,until you realize that you are supposed to be a cop in the usa,and theres just so many crap like this actually being done by cops the usa.At least no one in the hitman is remotely similar to anyone in real life.

It’s a bit of tragic coincidence that the week this aired (basically the day after they recorded it), there was a police shooting of an unarmed man in the back because the officer couldn’t be bothered to chase the man down. All caught on video.

It kinda stopped me mid-laugh after Ruts said something about gunning down people from behind while Chris was running through wherever with the bars and the pool.

I find it interesting that I didn’t think about such things at all while watching the video, even though it was nearly impossible to avoid video and stills of a police officer shooting a fleeing, unarmed man in the back just a few days ago. I can only assume it would be much more salient for someone who had to live with the threat of police intimidation and violence on a regular basis. For those of us who don’t, things like this can dull one’s sensitivity to it. Think of how absurd it seems to be worried about Khai knocking that criminal around in the midst of all that death. We should be glad that real violence still has the ability to shock us, and we shouldn’t overstate what media can get us to accept, but I do wonder about the effect ultraviolent police fantasies have on our cognition. Personally, I don’t trust the FBI as an institution, or individual FBI agents, even though fictional FBI agents are often my favorite TV heroes, but I also have *cough* unconventional leftist politics, so there are many factors that can come into play.

I’m only a few years younger than Shamus, and the only Burt Reynolds films I remember seeing (from his peak 1970s period, anyway) were the Cannonball Run films, because they were constantly broadcast as Sunday afternoon movies on TV when I was a kid. Oh, and Deliverance of course, but that’s a standout, unmustachioed role from the usual “good ol’ boy smuggles beer/beats up gators” portrayals he usually did in that era.

Completely off topic, just wanted to gloat (and confirm) that GTA V for the PC is now coming out on the 14th of April.

Just got the pre-order shipment announcement from a retailer here, the box/disc is in transit in the mail as I type this.

This means that if there are any changes needed then those will have to be day zero patches etc.
I’ll be pleasantly surprised if there are no day zero patches (for the single player) stuff. But maybe they pulled it off and shipped a retail game that don’t need to be patched to work “out of the box” ?.

PS! I’m a tad bummed out I did not make it into GTA V though. (I was a finalist as a face for a Episilon cult member.) I’m still gonna enjoy the game though.

Oh wow that cutscene with you being angry at her punching a guy was pure comedy.

Thats such bad design! They even made it work for themselves, it looks like they literally programmed the trigger for the cutscene so that bad guys would shoot you if you tried to trigger it. They _designed_ it so you’d almost _have_ to go immediately from gunning down people trying to kill to be angry at a person punching someone. And it’s without a break, it’s almost in the same breath *put a bullet in someones head*- “Hey stop punching that guy”.

Look I’ll make it better. Take all the enemies out the room immediately leading up to the cutscene. Now the player has spent 60 second walking calmly around a pretty modern and clean environment before seeing her beat someone up. Done.

Sure it’s still stupid, but the game isn’t actually trying its hardest to rub its stupidity in your face. And that’s how basic game structure/story beats are meant to work. If somethings violent and shocking, you put less violence immediately before it, not more

But it’s a programmed trigger. If you don’t arrest/kill every single guard in the room, then a mook will teleport behind you and start shooting you when you go through the door. Someone on youtube pointed out that you can actually see the teleport on the minimap.

I would actually believe that they might even spawn an enemy if you had arrested/killed everyone

Its a trigger for when you do not deal with everyone else first.Not really a bad design.Especially if the canon way is to arrest everyone there.Its your fault for trying to rush things and trigger this ridiculous teleport.

I mean,there are places in this game where its bad and stupid(like that thing with you shooting guys while holding the wound,or the stupid explodey car chase),but this is not one.

It is bad design. If the player can get to the door without neutralising some enemies and those enemies are unaware of the player’s presence, let the player proceed! The character has been told to get up there and not let anyone see him, after all.

Especially if you’re going to run them through the same room again right after. You can just add any leftover enemies to that pile.

It’s bad design if you it requires the player to do a very specific set of actions to function. I think you’re reading my reply in isolation without reading the first comment it was based on.

When you’re about to have a cutscene of violence that’s meant to be shocking its cruddy design to have the player go through a firefight immediately before that cutscene. It’s also cruddy design to try and justify your cruddy design with “the player was meant to behave a different way”.

And it’s especially cruddy design, if a player was going to not ruin the impact of your cutscene by stealthing it, that you cheat by teleporting an NPC in front of them so that they’re forced to put a bullet in someones head just before the cutscene about smacking someone up.

And then on top of that as ehlijen pointed out, immediately after that cutscene you’re going to go through that room again and this time be forced to kill anyone who was in it anyway, so it would have been perfectly fine to let the player leave them for later.

“You’re both excellent at improvising and terrible at keeping things quiet”

They plastered that line all over the trailers and I thought it was just a super generic cop movie line. I never even dreamed how ridiculous it would be in the game proper, after you’ve shot up a building and driven along a motorway with things blowing up and cars shooting you.

And you pull up literally 100 metres away from where the guys where shooting you (the guys who are still alive!), get out of the car and he says (literally within shouting range of the people with guns who were shooting at you and who are _still there_)
“You’re both excellent at improvising and terrible at keeping things quiet”

What!

EDIT: Your SCV is _smoking_ right in front of him. You literally drove through a car which _blew up_ right in front of his eyes and he’s saying “are you sure this guy got bumped during the ride”.

That was an excellent Robocop impression if you ask me! Even had that sort of … metallic-y twang. Or seemed to – actually that might just be my imagination working in tandem with my awful speakers. But the impression itself was quality! – two re-built thumbs up.

I think this whole game would have made more sense if the main character was less moral, they could have you doing all the awful shit you are doing (sneaking up and punching people, cuffing people and leaving them to die in the street… that sort of stuff.)

But only if you make the main character a slightly (moving to very by the end) unhinged psychopath, the whole thing having a very “Training Day” vibe, only with you playing as Washington’s character.

So… that the gunfights and car chases in this game make it seem like you’re trying to be Sly in Demolition Man doesn’t bother me. I understand why Rutskarn would be put off by it, but to me the ACTION COPS getting in ludicrous gunfights doesn’t register for me. I don’t see it as deplorable cop violence, I see it as dumb action cop stuff.

But what does put me off is Khai beating on Leo and Mendoza covering for her. That is not dumb action cop movie stuff.

Well, I guess it establishes Mendoza as a fairly green cop, as someone who feels surrounded by more experienced people and is an easy pushover in order to ‘fit into’ what he perceives as the cop culture.

Is this the last in this series for now? I guess the up side is we can go back to SquareEnix’s masterpiece, “Hitman: Absolution” after all of the Spoiler Warning crew has seen the trailer for the studio’s next game, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

That’s why I only take the promise of combat to be the (usually) only actual thing game trailers are factual about. Now, the nature of said combat is a different story, especially since the trailer isn’t gameplay footage.

As for Dead Island, no one should take any promise of a decent narrative or emotional resonance seriously in any game trailer. Most of the time it’s nonexistent in the final product, or it happens by accident. If there is decent emotional resonance, it’s not what the marketing department thinks would actually sell a game (which is dumb) and the trailer is a shoot-fest or a collection of spectacle-oriented clips.

I’m stuck in a frustrating position. Chris can bash Florida endlessly but if I say anything about why I think he and so many others do so, I’m likely going to start a flame war. I don’t want to start a flame war but I do want to express my frustration.

Its typical arrogance to write off people who did something you didn’t like as lunatics and idiots. Chris, I disagree with you about a lot of things but I’d never do you the same disservice. Maybe try taking a cue from some of the other members of the cast, like Shamus

“Dude! Its just a joke. Relax.”
Yeah, do you let that defense slide when the joke is at the expense of a group you protect? Either its all good or none of it is.

I don’t know why you think Chris hates Florida. What I do know is that I have multiple friends and family members who have lived there. NONE of them have anything positive to say about the state. One joined the marines and got shipped to a barren desert with no women or booze where he got shot at regularly in order to escape Florida and maintains it was the right decision. Basically, maybe Chris doesn’t hate Florida for the reasons you think he does, maybe he just hates the state because he had a terrible time there, like so many other people have.

This is not a game where you play as a cop. This is a game where you play a prisoner among other prisoners who are being forced to act out an action cop movie. No one cares what you wreck or who you kill outside of the story beats, cause that’s just the action stuff, not the script, like how no one really cares about the body counts or collateral in Bad Boys or the Lethal Weapon films, except as a reason to have an authority figure get mad and say a catchphrase. That’s why the highway you drove on was covered in more obstacles well beyond the one or two “Keep out” layers a real construction site or blockade would care about and had people waiting on it to hit their mark, shoot you, and then explode.
That also why no one pays attention to handcuffed people: they’re just other actors, not real criminals. Action movies don’t care about mooks. Once the bad guys are dealt with they can be ignored unless they’re important enough to escape for a later scene.
Attempts to escape the set, perceived or real, are met with lethal force, so the swamp boat is rigged to blow if you go out of bounds. I imagine any other vehicles are similarly equipped, which may also be why the cars you hit on the highway blew up.
I can only conclude from the scope of this imprisonment and the near invincibility of the main characters and your stolen SUV for the highway scene that some technologically advanced force is behind this that can contain on this level and shield or replace whoever/whatever they want.

I love this theory. I’d love a level where you bust out of the production and are causing mayhem in the area where all the writers, directors, and interns are set up, keeping this Running Man/Truman Show thing going.

Around 16:19, you drive the truck into a series of bollards, which are things that are specifically designed to stop vehicles in order to prevent them from going on sidewalks or into buildings, and they just get knocked away like they are made out of cardboard.

Did the environment artists just see bollards in reference pictures and put them in as smashables without even bothering to think for 5 seconds about why anyone would put a bunch of metal or concrete posts spaced widely enough for people to walk through but too narrow for cars to go through on the edge of the sidewalk?

Just a quick observation. At about 3:00, they drive off a street into an underground parking structure then quickly descend at least one additional level down. Can someone from Miami tell me how common it is to have multiple levels of underground parking below buildings that are four feet above sea-level?